It's Alright
by sortasupersam
Summary: Some pieces fit better than others, the grass is always greener, and existence leaves a funny taste in Mikasa's mouth. Meanwhile, Levi knows what he wants and he especially knows how to get it. A story about making really tough decisions. Levi/Mikasa.


_But I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo._

_What the hell am I doing here?_

_I don't belong here._

—_Radio Head_

* * *

They were in a synagogue—massive, gaudy, _expensive—_touring every last nook and cranny of the infrastructure, but Mikasa was slightly confused.

"Jean, we're not Jewish," She whispered in a tone just below hushed, in hopes that her comment would miss the ears of their rabbi guide, or the Messiah above.

"I know," He gave her an assuring pat in the spot right between her shoulder blades. "But my mother's side of the family is, and this was the only way I could guarantee their attendance to the wedding."

She knew his family was already on edge about Jean not marrying a Jewish girl, so she didn't know why she made that comment. Instead of listening to the rabbi describe the benefits of hosting their ceremony here, aside from the obvious religious factor, she pressed the padding of her thumb into the diamond of her ring, hard enough to leave imprints.

It was a cold day outside, much colder than past Februaries, and as Jean kept his arm wrapped around her shoulders, Mikasa could only internally count the number of layers of clothing that separated his touch from her bare flesh.

The rabbi—surely he had more pressing tasks to attend to than to give a pseudo-Jewish couple a tour of the building—continued on with the estimations of how many people the synagogue could hold, and Mikasa felt like they should have had this number written down somewhere.

She waited for a pause in his dialogue. "The place is lovely, but I think my fiance and I should discuss the religious nature of our wedding before making any decisions."

He stared for a moment, maybe offended that Mikasa described his house of worship as _the place_, then gave an affirmative nod, opened an invitation for the service on Friday, and made a coldly polite dismissal.

"Discuss the religious nature of our wedding?" Jean asked with sass in his voice, but a smile on his face. "What was all of that about?"

Mikasa had no clue. "I have no clue."

Her fiance, a title still foreign to her lips, although many months passed for the title to become more commonplace, rubbed that same spot between her shoulder blades. "Are you okay with a Jewish wedding?"

"I don't know," She was quiet for a moment, trying to phrase her words before speaking. "I should be."

"But _are_ you?"

She didn't know what to say. "I'm not Jewish. I don't even _look _Jewish."

"Well, for one," He was smiling. Jean wasn't much of a cheery guy. "A religion shouldn't come with a certain look."

"Sorry," She averted her eyes. She wondered why they were still standing in the synagogue even though their business had long concluded. "I'm sorry."

"You're _cute,_" Jean kissed her nose, lips trailing downward for something more intimate. "But maybe I shouldn't try to get my mack on in a temple, huh?"

It was the perfect opportunity to pull away so she took it. Mikasa pulled the red fabric of her scarf over her nose. She pressed her forehead into the center of his pectorals, closing her eyes. His embrace was so comforting, but the diamond-embedded metal on her left hand was still heavy.

"What are you doing after this?" She felt Jean's lips form words into the roots of her black hair. "I'd like to take you out on a lunch date."

"I have to be at the hospital," Mikasa answered with more apology in her voice than she anticipated. "Dr. Jaeger will feed me to the nurses if I'm late."

"He's your dad and you call him _Doctor _Jaeger?"

"Adoptive dad," She corrected, quietly. "Even then, it never felt right to call him my _dad_."

"He loves you," Jean could feel the heaviness in the air, because leave it to Mikasa to provide the weight. "If only you knew how hard I had to fight to win his blessing."

"I feel like Eren played a large part in that," Mikasa referred to her adoptive brother. He was a sore subject to Jean, but leave it to Mikasa to not realize these things.

"If I visit you in the hospital tonight," They headed out to their respective cars, Jean holding open all doors in their path for her. "Does that mean we can finally have that quickie in the janitor's closet?"

"Not tonight," She slipped into the driver's seat of her car still strong with that fresh leather smell. "We're getting a new attending, so I feel like my job is going to be much more difficult than it usually is."

"Well, I'll still be sure to bring you a sandwich and your coffee the way you like it. I have to be at the station by midnight, so I'll swing by on the way."

Mikasa felt bad for not giving him that quickie. But she still managed to put her keys in the ignition and drive off without doing anything about it.

* * *

She wasn't quite fond of the tangerine smell. It was sharp and overwhelming, but Jean gifted it to her with a cheerful insistence. _Your hands are always dry from washing them_, she remembered his logic. So Mikasa faithfully smeared a dime-sized amount of tangerine hand cream over her fingers, perpetually kept the tube snugly in the hip pocket of her scrubs, and pretended that smelling like an orange grove was of her own personal preference.

After all, a beautiful engagement ring needed a beautiful finger as a vessel.

"Dr. Ackerman!" Mikasa jumped at the nurse's call. The woman stood behind the station with the earpiece of the phone pressed to her neck. "You might want to head down to the pit. He's been down there for half an hour now."

There was no need for formalities. _He _was Eren. Mikasa appreciated the nurses' collective agreement to not mention any details above absolutely necessary when regarding her adoptive brother. Whether it was out of good grace for Mikasa's sake or not, she nodded promptly. Her sneaker squeaked with the turn of her heel, and she made a point to take the stairs down. Dr. Jaeger _never _took the stairs.

When she got down to the pit, she managed to catch whiff of the chaos that comes with an emergency room. A baby was wailing from somewhere, a man's family crowded out from their own designated curtain space. Blood or vomit or a mixture of the two was on the floor, but at least someone had the decency to put up a wet floor sign. She saw a footprint in the mess.

As the nurses' agreement spread hospital-wide, it was most strictly followed in the emergency room, as this was Eren's place of choice for a visit. One of the older nurses didn't bother to say anything but merely a nod toward curtain three, as this was Mikasa's communication of choice.

She swished the curtain back, and low and behold, there was Eren Jaeger lying in the bed with a hospital gown poorly tied around his neck, with his regular shoes and jeans still on bottom. Mikasa went about checking and rechecking his stats, even going as far as measuring his pulse manually twice even though the machine next to the bed was already doing it. She knew this would make him mad and get him talking.

"You ignorning me is making me mad," Eren was talking too loud. "Mikasa, _talk _to me."

"Patient showing signs of agitation," Mikasa all but hummed, abandoning the pulse count and moving toward a body inspection. This would be easy, as his arms were restrained to the bed. "Why did they cuff you?"

"The ambulance guy was looking at me funny," The paranoia in his voice made Mikasa's heart hurt. "I punched him so hard he puked."

She checked his left shoe. The bottom was covered with aformentioned puke. "Eren, you realize that he could press charges and you'd be admitted again."

Eren grinned, a little unsettling to Mikasa, as he leaned forward in a hushed voice. "What can they do to me? I'm a _titan._"

"A what?" Mikasa didn't allow him to expound on that thought, because as she pulled back the bandages that wrapped his right fist, her stomach dropped. "Eren, what happened to your hand?"

"Armin was there—" Eren's eyes were bright in color, dark in pretty much else. A lowcast haze of something unnerving as he stared into his lap. "Armin, Armin, _Armin._"

The next course of action was to obviously call Armin. Eren, as Mikasa feared, was losing his lucidity. So she dialed her friend on her personal cell phone. He answered on the first ring and she stepped out of the curtain away from Eren.

"Mikasa, hey! I'm in the parking garage right now, heading to the ER—"

"Yeah, I just did a partial exam on him. What happened to his—"

"The cops wouldn't let me follow the ambulance until after they got a statement—"

She heard the word _cops _and suddenly that dropped stomach pretty much fell out of her ass. "Cops? Jesus fucking—" She forced herself to take a sharp inhale. "What happened to his hand? There are cuts so bad that I can see his bone."

Armin, arguably as quiet as Mikasa, if not more, shrieked. "He bit himself!"

"He bit himself?" Mikasa watched as a janitor mopped up the puke mess.

"We went out to a bar since he insisted he could handle a beer or two. Words were said, bottles were thrown. Not with me, but with some asshole that was there. Eren kept saying how he was a _titan_ and all he had to do was turn into one and the guy would be dead—"

"What does he mean by _titan_?"

"No clue, that was the very first time I'd ever heard him say that. And then, _immediately_ and _without hesitation_, clamped down on his own hand. It was horrifying!"

Eren's self-harm was never so violent, and the last time he hurt himself he was eighteen. Mikasa's heart joined her stomach in the sinking. "He's definitely going to need stitches. We'll see how bad he severed his nerves and if he'll need surgery."

"I'm sorry, Mikasa. I'm in the lobby, I'll be there in a second."

Mikasa hung up without as much as a good-bye. She managed to wander down the hallway while on the phone, and started walking back to Eren. Then she heard screaming, familiar screaming, and a nurse hollering for security. She took off running, throwing back the curtain, seeing Eren's hand bleeding again, and a traumatized intern with blood on his face.

"What happened?" Mikasa yelled down to the intern on the floor. Eren was still screaming vulgarities, medical instruments were all over the floor. At this point, a few nurses and a security guard were pinning Eren to the bed. "Don't _hurt _him!"

"Hurt him?" The intern was screaming to be heard over Eren. "I freed his hand to change his bandages and get a better look at the nerves and_ he _attacked_ me!_"

Mikasa shut her eyes, but only for a quick second. "Get out of here, go clean up your face." He hurried away, dropping Eren's bloody gauze. The white pads were soaked. "Push fifty of quetiapine," She ordered the nurse, helping with getting Eren re-restrained. "Eren, _shh! _It's _me_, Mikasa! You're with me in the hospital, we're visiting dad, okay? _Shh!_"

"M-Mikasa," He managed to hoarsely force out her name. He was still hysterical, but at least quieter in his episode. "W-What? My hand hurts."

"You bit your own hand, we gave you some medicine to help with the pain," Mikasa, calm and collected. Voice even, brain blank. "Do you want me to get you anything? Some water?"

"D-Did I transform?" Before Mikasa could ask what he meant, he sighed. His teal eyes were sunken. "Into a titan, did I transform?"

She was always told to never encourage his episodes, both by her psych rotations in medical school and by Dr. Jaeger himself. But she her voice was even and her brain was blank. Before she managed to get his fist back in the cuff belted to the bed, she held his hand with surgical delicacy. "Yes, you did. You're okay, everything is better."

And then there was a flash of light as her brain bounced against the inside of her skull. There was a sharpness of pain and then a dull throbbing because she just got punched in the jaw. Her mouth was bleeding, but she couldn't quite tell if it was from the inside or out, and whether if it was even her blood. She stumbled back, listening to Eren scream on the top of his lungs. "_Liar! _I can't listen to you!"

Security took over cuffing him back down, the nurse pushed a needle in his IV. He was still screaming when she closed the curtain as she left. Without as much as a second glance from the nurses and their stupidly comforting silence, she looked at the janitor who had pretty much finished up the puke mess.

Then to a nurse, Mikasa cleared her throat. She pulled out a pen, carefully writing down in the chart she was handed. "Order a psych consult. Push bubrenorphine, get ortho to look at his hand for nerve damage," In a softer, more pleading voice, one that probably caused the nurse agreement to begin with, Mikasa tried to hold her breath. "Keep him sedated until psych commits him."

* * *

Thankfully the blood didn't belong to Mikasa, but the swelling of her lip made it look like bad plastic surgery injections. It took exactly one person to question it before Mikasa hung her head with insecurity. Not necessarily a cosmetic insecurity, but more of the fact that Dr. Jaeger would for sure ask questions. And Mikasa was the child with answers, hence the word _doctor_ that sat at the front of her name.

It was a slower night, as she filled out charts for all the patients that had died for the week. Paper work was not her least favorite part of the job, so she silently sat behind the station in the dimmed light, resting her jaw in her hand in a way that hid her swollen lips. "Dr. Ackerman," She looked up to see Jean holding a bag from a deli and a mug of what she hoped was coffee. "Hi baby."

"Hey," She really didn't want to have to deal with showing him her swollen lip, but keeping her hand there seemed suspicious so he'd ask anyway. Mikasa hoped he'd pick up on the nonchalant. "How'd you get a sandwich from Katz's this late?"

He did not pick up on the nonchalant. "What happened to your mouth!?"

"Oh, uh," She did not like to stutter and did not like to lie. "I got punched."

Jean was at least, thankfully, fairly lax. Protective, but calm. "Do you need me to be a cop for a second?"

"No, it's okay. Eren came into the pit a few hours ago. He was having a, uh, an—" She forced herself to look down. In these few hours that passed, she did a very good job of not thinking about it and not forming any opinion on anything. "He had an episode, I just didn't restrain him when I should have."

"Are you okay?" Jean leaned on the counter to get closer to her face. "I don't mean medically."

Mikasa was certainly not fond of lying. She, of course, was lying. "I'm fine. It wasn't that serious."

"In the police academy, we learn of a term called_ assault,_" Mikasa knew he meant well, but she felt a wave of irrational anger take over her body. She kept a straight face. "And I don't want you to compromise your safety, even if it was your brother."

"But it _was _my brother, and it's nothing I'm not used to."

That promptly ended _that _conversation. Mikasa felt Jean's eyes on her as she tried to finish writing in the chart. "I love you, Mikasa Ackerman."

She put her pen down. "I love you too."

Of course it wouldn't be an interaction between Mikasa and, well, _anyone _without interruption from her adoptive father. This time he had company. "Dr. Ackerman," His words were as harsh as any frigid hello.

Jean squared up his shoulders to be faced with his future father-in-law, but it was futile. Dr. Jaeger managed to humor him with a handshake. "Officer Kirschstein."

Mikasa, who had seen her adoptive father every day for nearly fifteen years, was more interested in the lanky woman precisely three steps to his left. She had a frizzy mess of burnt brown hair pulled off her masculine face. The ID badge clipped to the pocket of her white coat had a name and Mikasa focused on trying to make out the letters. It was a better option than to listen to Jean's attempts at chatting with Dr. Jaeger.

"It says _Zoe,_" The woman finally spoke. Much higher-pitched and certainly too cheery for a hospital. Unless it was pediatrics, but this was post-surgery ICU. Cheer did not exist within the confines of these linoleum floors and fluorescent lights.

"I'm sorry, what?" Mikasa forgot that some conversations required an immediate response. She had been far too fascinated with the paradox of existence with this woman's voice in this setting.

The woman tapped her badge. "I saw you staring. Dr. Hanji Zoe, brand new head of the trauma surgery department."

Paradox space was just begging for a rip in the spacetime continuum. This woman, voice of the cheery gods, dealt with the most gruesome and least cheery genre of human dissection? How does she do it? That utter...happiness. Mikasa shivered.

"Yeah, I thought it was pretty cold here too!" Dr. Hanji Zoe, brand new head of the trauma surgery department, smiled because Mikasa still hadn't really said anything viable for a substantial conversation yet. "I can see you shivering."

"Why are you up here?"

At least she finally said something.

Jean halted his conversation to notice the rudeness of Mikasa's blunt question, let alone the fact that said rude question was directed to her brand new head of the trauma surgery department boss. Dr. Jaeger decided that was enough unsupervised talking for Mikasa. "Excuse me, Dr. Ackerman, but you need to think before—"

"It's fine, Grisha," Dr. Hanji Zoe, brand new head of the trauma surgery department, not only interrupted him, but by using his first name. Mikasa wasn't even sure she even knew her adoptive father's name before this. "I was simply getting a tour for the first day on the job."

"Your first shift started at eleven o'clock at night?"

Mikasa was certainly filled with questions. Dr. Hanji Zoe simply kept with that smile. "Well, aren't you filled with such lethal curiosity? But to answer your question, I just had irregular circumstances that led me to right here, right now."

"We're off, Dr. Ackerman," Dr. Jaeger decided to nip this whole interaction before it could possibly get worse. He tugged Dr. Hanji Zoe, brand new head of trauma surgery, along. Like a well-oiled train on its tracks. "Off to radiology, Dr. Zoe?"

She just looked at Mikasa, no longer smiling. That contagious cheeriness, _contagious_ used in a more negative connotation for this instance, was still pestering the hell out of Mikasa. "It will be a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Mikasa Ackerman."

They headed down the hall, turned the corner and out of sight. "Man, she's a strange one," Jean, who Mikasa honestly forgot was there for a second, whistled lowly. "But that's unfair. Maybe she'll be good to work with. You are always complaining for a challenge, right?"

Not once did Mikasa ever recall complaining for such a thing. It was more of a silent complaint than anything. She couldn't seem to shake the fact, though, that she never formally introduced her name to Dr. Zoe. Of course there was her policy-mandated ID badge clipped to the very same place that Dr. Hanji Zoe, brand new head of the trauma surgery department, had pinned to her scrubs. But that seemed a bit too obvious.

"—and I know how much you hate talking about it, but we really need to find you bridesmaids—or at least a maid of honor," Jean was talking about the wedding. It should have been Mikasa that brought it up in the first place because she was the bride and brides love this sort of thing.

"I don't know," She was happy to talk about these trivial wedding things because that's what they were—trivial, and for the most part, harmless. "There's still no one in mind."

"What about Sasha?" Jean already knew that answer before the question fully left his mouth.

Mikasa recalled seeing this Sasha girl, whom she had met dozens of times in casually awkward encounters when at various parties, and recalled that very pretty face. Cheery, like Dr. Hanji Zoe, but she wasn't a trauma surgeon. No, Sasha was a kindergarten teacher or something equally fulfilling and wholesome. She was also Jean's high school sweetheart and had bigger breasts than Mikasa.

"She was more of your friend than mine."

"I was just brainstorming," Jean was either too dense or too nice to really comment on Mikasa's mild shift into inferiority. "But I have to go, so I'll leave you to your sandwich."

"Okay."

"I love you," He said in that sing-songy don't-be-angry-with-your-betroathed voice that unreasonably got under her skin.

She was going to say okay again but caught herself. Couples, especially the engaged ones, tended to reciprocate romantic sentiments. "I love you, too," She said because she meant it.

* * *

That cheeriness was fake as hell, Mikasa realized. Or not fake, but a very convincing default demeanor. All that toothy smiling and eye squinting, nose scrunching—not for Mikasa. Well, she never really tried to encompass such a happy aura. It started and ended with realistic pessimism, with a sprinkle of dry wit and the occassional-yet-welcome sort-of-smile. But the point was that she was staring at Dr. Hanji Zoe wrist-deep in the chest of an awake and breathing man.

Granted, he was strapped to the gurney and probably was pumped to the brim with every narcotic in the pharmacy, yet she was straddling his thighs, hunched over the man as she fished around the inside his torso. The nurses and extended personnel were wheeling the Dr. Hanji Zoe bus to presumably the OR, but not without harsh demands getting spewed out. Her voice commanded power, was a little shrill, and, as mentioned, lead Mikasa to believe the cheeriness was an act. That hellbent look of determination in the woman's eye. She was confident that putting the hand in the chest was a good decision—the _right _decision.

"Dr. Ackerman!" The Zoe Bus was headed right for her. "What do we have here?"

Mikasa did not know a damn thing. She knew that she was paged to the ER, expecting an Eren-related incident, but was instead greeted with this. Not even a glance at a chart, but her new boss, the brand new head of the trauma surgery department, was expecting answers.

"Uh, I uh—" As simple as an inhale, she breathed in every last atom in the emergency room. She felt the electricity of panicking nurses and traumatized family members, and she especially felt the expectant gaze of Dr. Hanji Zoe on her. She tingled with every scary nerve in her body. "From what I can see, it's a GSW, penetrating chest wound."

"Good, very good! What should be your top concerns right now?"

Easy. "Assuming you already checked for pnemonuthorax—"

"I did, and what did I do about it?"

Easier. "Sterile occlusive dressing."

"What should I worry about right now?"

Mikasa was walking right along the gurney as it wheeled further into the hospital. "Hemothorax, pericardial tamponade—"

"He has a huge hemothorax! What now?"

Maybe this adrenaline was just another word for cheerful. It was beautiful the way her heart hurt with anxiety. Mikasa was bouncing on her toes as she practically sprinted to keep up with the Zoe Bus. "Inserting a chest tube is the standard treatment—"

"I'm not a standard woman, Dr. Ackerman!"

"We need to perform a thoracotomy, Dr. Zoe!"

"The GSW shattered his sternum and I'm literally holding Humpty Dumpty together here!" The Zoe Bus was wheeled into the OR, right when the doors were ready to shut in Mikasa's face. "Go scrub in! I just fucked up his chest big time, so _you_ get to clean up my mess!"

She took a second to breathe. Jean was technically right. This was a challenge that Mikasa was looking for.

* * *

Seven hours standing with perfect posture. Until her kneecaps burned, until the tears of her watery eyes rolled down to pool around her lips. Mikasa never got a chance to eat that sandwich, so she was going on sixteen hours without nourishment, and double that time without sleep. Her hair was probably a greasy mess.

"You were strong in there," Mikasa barely had it in her to look up from her chair, but she knew that to be Dr. Zoe's voice. She should know. She just listened to it for seven hours. All cheery all over again. "Stoic, focused. I saw the way your hand was twisted to hold that clamp for two solid hours. That endurance is almost frightening."

There wasn't much for Mikasa to say. She knew all these things that Dr. Zoe mentioned. But she was too exhausted to be a piece of shit. "Thank you, Dr. Zoe."

"I haven't forgotten how quick you were to analyze the situation before you even knew a thing," She was referring to the part where Mikasa knew every answer. Mikasa knew all this, too. "You're, what, a second or third-year resident? Being able to recall that so quickly?"

"I just do well under pressure," She shrugged, eyeing the apple sitting by an unattended lunch bag at the nurse's station. Of course Mikasa did well under pressure. There were many instances in her life that required to think fast. And then there was Dr. Jaeger who was the epitome of pressure.

"You want that apple?"

Mikasa was confused. "What?"

"I see the way you're looking at that apple," And she leaned over the counter, plucked the fruit right off of the stack of papers it was on. Forever missed by its true owner. "Here."

The next thing her eyes registered was a green sphere flying at her face, and at a speed much higher than the typical friendly underhand toss. She was so tired she couldn't even think of sleeping anywhere but in the plastic waiting room chair. But Mikasa _did _catch the apple, with one hand. Not even one flinch.

"You think fast, you have good reflexes," Mikasa was too focused on the ooze of the tart, sweet juice of the apple's flesh. Dr. Zoe kept talking anyway. "I know it's a little early, but have you considered trauma as your discipline?"

No. "No."

"How about I offer you an opportunity to get invaluable experience on the field, and not just in some stuffy concrete building with the word _Memorial _plastered to the front?"

She didn't notice that Dr. Hanji Zoe, the new head of trauma surgery, was talking a lot quieter. She also wondered if that was a real question. All volunteer opportunities were both stapled to the board in the elevator and on a stack of pamphlets outside the human resources office.

Mikasa looked at Dr. Hanji Zoe. She was definitely a weird one, like Jean had mentioned. The woman was broad-shouldered and tall, with a bigger nose, but with feminine hips. Her hair needed some highlights, but mostly her glasses needed to go. Mikasa wondered what her shoe size was. Since Dr. Zoe gave such an absurd offer, she figured she'd return the favor. "How would you like to be the maid of honor at my wedding?"

Dr. Zoe laughed, not any particular sort of laugh, but she also nodded. "I'll see if my schedule is clear. In the meantime, I'd like you to come with me. It's a personal project of sorts, and with your skill set, I know that it's the type of place where you'll thrive."

There was still half an apple left. "Now?"

"Yes, now."

* * *

_Oh god I'm back._


End file.
